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Page 19
Instead the fly suddenly stopped.
Peering out they could see they were still in the village street,
with small dark houses each side; and Beppo, throwing the reins over
the horse's back as if completely confident this time that he would not
go any farther, got down off his box. At the same moment, springing as
it seemed out of nothing, a man and several half-grown boys appeared on
each side of the fly and began dragging out the suit-cases.
"No, no--San Salvatore, San Salvatore"--exclaimed Mrs. Wilkins,
trying to hold on to what suit-cases she could.
"Si, si--San Salvatore," they all shouted, pulling.
"This can't be San Salvatore," said Mrs. Wilkins, turning to Mrs.
Arbuthnot, who sat quite still watching her suit-cases being taken from
her with the same patience she applied to lesser evils. She knew she
could do nothing if these men were wicked men determined to have her
suit-cases.
"I don't think it can be," she admitted, and could not refrain
from a moment's wonder at the ways of God. Had she really been brought
here, she and poor Mrs. Wilkins, after so much trouble in arranging it,
so much difficulty and worry, along such devious paths of prevarication
and deceit, only to be--
She checked her thoughts, and gently said to Mrs. Wilkins, while
the ragged youths disappeared with the suit-cases into the night and
the man with the lantern helped Beppo pull the rug off her, that they
were both in God's hands; and for the first time on hearing this, Mrs.
Wilkins was afraid.
There was nothing for it but to get out. Useless to try to go on
sitting in the fly repeating San Salvatore. Every time they said it,
and their voices each time were fainter, Beppo and the other man merely
echoed it in a series of loud shouts. If only they had learned Italian
when they were little. If only they could have said, "We wish to be
driven to the door." But they did not even know what door was in
Italian. Such ignorance was not only contemptible, it was, they now
saw, definitely dangerous. Useless, however, to lament it now.
Useless to put off whatever it was that was going to happen to them by
trying to go on sitting in the fly. They therefore got out.
The two men opened their umbrellas for them and handed them to
them. From this they received a faint encouragement, because they
could not believe that if these men were wicked they would pause to
open umbrellas. The man with the lantern then made signs to them to
follow him, talking loud and quickly, and Beppo, they noticed, remained
behind. Ought they to pay him? Not, they thought, if they were going
to be robbed and perhaps murdered. Surely on such an occasion one did
not pay. Besides, he had not after all brought them to San Salvatore.
Where they had got to was evidently somewhere else. Also, he did not
show the least wish to be paid; he let them go away into the night with
no clamour at all. This, they could not help thinking, was a bad sign.
He asked for nothing because presently he was to get so much.
They came to some steps. The road ended abruptly in a church and
some descending steps. The man held the lantern low for them to see
the steps.
"San Salvatore?" said Mrs. Wilkins once again, very faintly,
before committing herself to the steps. It was useless to mention it
now, of course, but she could not go down steps in complete silence.
No mediaeval castle, she was sure, was ever built at the bottom of
steps.
Again, however, came the echoing shout--"Si, si--San Salvatore."
They descended gingerly, holding up their skirts just as if they
would be wanting them another time and had not in all probability
finished with skirts for ever.
The steps ended in a steeply sloping path with flat stone slabs
down the middle. They slipped a good deal on these wet slabs, and the
man with the lantern, talking loud and quickly, held them up. His way
of holding them up was polite.
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Wilkins in a low voice to Mrs. Arbuthnot,
"It is all right after all."
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